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to revelation. What I mean to show now is that Condorcet maintained this
theme of scientific obedience while also obscuring its religious bases by col-
lapsing Bacon's two topics into the one topic of nature.
Condorcet's historical sketch was not directly aimed at the promotion
of science, as Bacon's
New Atlantis
had been, but it has its own share in
the latter's imaginative supposition that the meaning of history is revealed
in the evolution of science. Moreover, it is particularly significant that
the
Esquisse
is a rendition of that more general narrative upon which the
Enlightenment and the political rhetoric of the French Revolution were
founded. As a political story that justified liberation from the impostures of
monarchy and church by appealing to the solitary authority of reason and
nature, the Enlightenment narrative was itself a displacement grounded in
the deism of its chief philosophers. The deists no longer had any use for
special revelation, but this only meant that the work of natural revelation
had entirely appropriated this role. To the extent that science was seen as
the office most capable of reading the topic of nature, it had in some sense
become the central actor in the historical drama imagined by that cluster
of philosophers and social reformers that gathered around Voltaire and the
Encyclopédie
. This implied that the very existence of the new civilization
envisioned by this movement would depend upon the enlargement of scien-
tific knowledge.
For this reason, the rationale for scientific patronage suggested by Con-
dorcet's narrative had greater long-term potential than the one Bacon had
envisioned. In a worldview such as Bacon's, where there were two topics and
thus two distinct avenues to truth, the best that science could hope for was
a seat alongside the clerical priesthood at the table of public patronage. But
in the world envisioned by Condorcet and various other
philosophes
, there
was only one topic and one priesthood. Their “topic” was not yet one that
could be read only by scientists. The republic of reason envisioned in the
Enlightenment was, as Steve Fuller has called it, a “big democracy,” a broad
confederation of intellectual pursuits united by the inspiration it took from
the example of science. But to the extent that it was science that now epito-
mized this potential, we can easily see the inspiration that later advocates of
a specifically professional ideology of scientism would take from this vision
as they strove to build the more exclusive “small democracy” of positivism
that anticipates the elitism of evolutionism.
4
Two things begin to come clear once we recognize the thematic continu-
ity that Condorcet's vision shares with Bacon's. The first is that rhetorical
constructions employed to secure science's epistemological autonomy must
